Can Col. Douglas Macgregor Help Elon Musk Tame the Warfare State?
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Hi, I'm David Gronoski. I'm the host of A Neighbor's Choice, and you usually see me in my studio, but today I have the opportunity and the privilege to be here in the studios of the organization Our Country, Our Choice.

with their CEO, a frequent guest of my program, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Thanks for letting me into your place for once. This is cool. Oh, absolutely. It's a nice change, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I like it. And I think it's something that we're all going to be really excited to see what the vision, first of all, for folks on my show, we've talked about our country, our choice a little bit, but just to kind of set the table since we're here in your studio today,

What is the mission of this group, Our Country, Our Children? Well, the mission is to build a movement that recognizes that the two parties are failing. They really don't present us with good alternatives. They make too many decisions, policy decisions, on the basis of who lobbies them and how much money they receive. We have to have a movement that is fundamentally focused on American national interests and, most important, on what happens here inside the United States.

So, you know, as an example, we talk about security in terms of defending ourselves, defending our borders, defending the literal waters, not invading other people's countries. We talk about a whole range of things, including securing the border and also restoring the rule of law. And the border and the rule of law are, in my judgment, inextricably intertwined. We have all the laws that we possibly could need on the books to justify the

whatever we need to do on the border with immigration. We just don't enforce our laws. And then, of course, we're very concerned about the health of our people, the health of the average American. We have too many Americans who are not just obese, but struggling with a whole range of diseases. And some of these could be avoided. Some of this has to do with the food we ingest. And we want to talk about those kinds of things. We want to set policies in place that can help us be more healthy and physically fit.

And then we're tired of the sexualization of our children in schools. We want to see an end to this along with the human trafficking, specifically of our children.

These are the kinds of things that unite us. We're not interested in dividing people. We want people to be Americans first. We're not interested in the hybrid that says, well, I'm something else and then I'm an American. No, just be an American. That's what we desperately need right now in order to bring us together across party lines to unify into one movement that can actually make a difference in Washington.

Right. Well, you know, it sounds like in this organization, it's okay to like your country. Oh, absolutely. And it sounds like you're not covering some Mickey Mouse subjects there. I mean, those are some heavy topics. One of the things that I have been really keen on doing for my program is, of course,

getting to the facts about foreign policy, militarism, what are we doing with our foreign affairs? And I think that, you know, I came up when I was young in college years following Ron Paul and helping him. And he was the guy that first kind of opened my mind to the idea that our foreign policy was not what we were sold. And I had to take time to kind of process the full depth

of the rot of that whole system, right? And I think still people are still kind of lagging behind some of the things that are really going on. Like for example,

When we talk about, you know, oh, we are, you know, it's very popular nowadays to say, you know, we're against forever wars. I mean, even neocons say that now, you know, it's become such a. It's right. Yeah. And it doesn't mean anything. You're like, well, what about this proxy war? What about that? What about that? Oh, yeah, yeah. We got to keep doing that. But just don't have a full fledged war. That's all. And it's like, come on. No, those proxy wars are just as catastrophic as the full fledged wars really, isn't it? Well, one of the things, too, that I didn't get to mention in the list there.

is the importance of American energy and getting past all of these prohibitions and taboos against coal, oil, natural gas. We have to exploit those. We also have other areas that we need to exploit, rare earths and mineral wealth. And finally, we need to do something about agriculture. We used to be the breadbasket of the world. For some reason or another, we aren't any longer.

And it doesn't seem as though we really need this thing called the Department of Agriculture. What we need to do is

unleash agriculture inside the United States. And then finally, it's high-end manufacturing. That's enormously important. We lost much of that. People don't realize it, but back in 1990, 91, we were leading the world in terms of high-end manufacturing with regard to microcircuitry. And today, that capability sits largely on Taiwan. We used to do that. We

We've got to get back into this and we have to focus like lasers on those key things, energy, agriculture, and high-end manufacturing. Now, when it comes back to this question of wars and forever wars, you make a very important point.

People say, "Sure, I'm against all those things." Well, what are those things? What do they come from? They come from this predisposition that we developed after World War II to meddle all over the world in various societies on the grounds that we were somehow or another perfectly gifted. After all, we won the Second World War, at least in the West, and we now have the holy obligation to carry the message of liberal democracy everywhere.

well that hasn't worked very well right and and what what in fact we discover is that the so-called liberal democracy scam was backed by a lot of other interests most of which were never terribly important to us you know today you know you look at a map

And you say, what was it that justified spending enormous quantities of money and 58,000 dead Americans, over 100,000 wounded in Vietnam, and to spend almost 10 years involved with that, killing an estimated 2 million Vietnamese in the process?

and then what did we do we left yeah you know what people today say what were we ever doing there well i think you could ask that question all over the world right because you don't need to park a tank on top of an oil well to get the oil out you don't have to bribe bully or bludgeon or bomb people who don't necessarily agree with you you can you have something called diplomacy you can actually work out arrangements you can get past obstacles without resorting to those

But it's been so long since we practiced real diplomacy and very long since we really had a strategy. You brought up a point that people talk a lot in younger circles. There's all kinds of programs about masculinity and so forth. People talk about alpha males and beta males. And I have to say, it is a kind of beta male posture that we have had in foreign policy. Insecure, weak.

completely not confident, always having to, you know, force every, you better be my friend or else I'm going to get you. You know, I'm going to threaten you. I'm going to hurt you if you don't like me. And this kind of, this almost like a neurotic Chihuahua image that comes out of DC on the world stage, rather than what the founding fathers exemplified, which was much more alpha male. If you want to use those themes, those themes, this kind of

quiet confidence, right? John Quincy Adams, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. George Washington in his farewell address saying, staying out of entangling alliances, these are people that put their lives on the line before they became president, and they have a kind of alpha male energy in the way they talk about foreign policy, which is lost with all this interventionism. It's very weak, in my opinion. Well, we also bring out these tried and true, uh,

themes that are absolutely meaningless and destructive, but we pass them out and insist that they're true. Good example is Vietnam. We said, if we don't go into Vietnam, then ultimately the communists in North Vietnam are going to rule right over Southeast Asia. And every nation in Southeast Asia will become communist.

so that meant we had to stop it where were we going to stop it in south vietnam we were really involved in someone else's civil war and the legacy of colonialism but that never really came through but that same old trite tired nauseating argument was trotted out in 2003 and 2004 in iraq right just at the time i was leaving the army owner about one june

2004, I was watching the latest television report coming in and I saw General Abizaid.

and Abizade at the time was the new US Central Command commander. And he was asked, "What are we doing here in Iraq? In your estimation, General, what are we doing?" And he said, "Well, we're here to stop these Islamists because if we don't stop them here, we'll be fighting them in America." And that was almost word for word what Lyndon Johnson and McNamara told everyone back in 1965, '66, '67, '68.

If we don't stop the communists right now in Vietnam, we'll be fighting them in Los Angeles, in the streets of Washington and New York City. It's all nonsense. It was never true. But this kind of misrepresentation becomes commonplace. And the problem you have in the military is whoever happens to be in charge at the top has learned to repeat ad nauseum the lie because that's part of your job. This is what the president says. This is what the Secretary of Defense says.

and nobody bothers to stand there and say well that's ridiculous it's not true because they'll be told well then you can retire yeah well then retire yeah you know and this is of course what happened in the 60s in many cases and the run-up to vietnam we had people distinguish people like gavin and ridgeway and others

General Shoup and the Marine Corps Commandant who won the Medal of Honor on Tarawa. And they spoke out against the Vietnam War. But they were drowned out because there weren't enough of them. And the people who were in charge of active duty, they didn't leave. See, if they had stepped up and said, I can't support this, my conscience won't permit it.

But you see, the conscience will not permit them to leave and forego all the cash that they can make in the private sector after they leave in the defense industrial complex or the banking system or wherever else.

So this is a huge problem. Yeah. My friend Owen said one time in a film we did, he said, you know, I like General Smedley Butler. He was a guy that wrote this famous book, War is a Racket, where he detailed how much grift and $400 toothbrushes and all these things that people were making money with war. He said, I like Smedley Butler, but the problem with them is you always wait until they retire before they tell the truth. They wait until they got their grift all nice, and then they come out and say, oh, yeah, it was kind of bad, if you get that even.

And that's the problem is you've got to have a ground floor reassessment before we spend everybody having long careers. And then we're all going to find out 50 years from now all the latest foreign bunglings that we did. Right. Find it out after it's too late. Here's an interesting story. And I don't think anything like this happened after we went into Iraq or for that matter, Afghanistan.

But Lyndon Johnson, after a couple of years of struggling in Vietnam without anybody really knowing what we were doing, and that was true, we just didn't know, he asked General Omar Bradley, the retired five-star, to go to Vietnam, talk to as many people as possible, and come back and tell him what was happening and what he thought of it. So Bradley did that, and after several months, he came back to see the president. The president said...

Well, General, you know, sat down on the sofa in the Oval Office. Tell me, what's going on over there? And he said, very, very frankly, he said, Mr. President, I can't find anyone from private up through general who can tell me what it is that they're supposed to be doing. He said, what do you mean? He said, you ask anybody, a battalion commander, a company commander, a first sergeant, a corps commander, a general, doesn't make any difference.

what's your mission? What do you think you're really doing here? What are you really trying to accomplish? And he said, privately, they all said, we don't know. And Lyndon Johnson said, well, that's not right. He said, it can't be. So Omar Bradley took one of these legal pads that was sitting on the table with a pen and he handed it to Johnson and said, well, then sit down and write for me the mission of our forces in Vietnam. And so Johnson sat there and he started, he started. Well,

Well, you know, General, this takes some time. He said, if you can't write what the mission is in three or four sentences, then I think you ought to get out. That simple. I never heard anybody do anything like that because once we've gone in the various places where I've served in the Middle East or Libya or anywhere else,

you realize there's no intention to ever leave yeah and and the sort of the false argument is well we can't tell people when we're going to leave the enemy doesn't have a vote in that and they don't need to know when that's going to happen that's a lot of nonsense eisenhower sent several thousand marines and soldiers to lebanon in the 1950s he didn't like it he didn't want to go in there but he said they're going to go there for one year and after one year they're out

And I mean it. And sure enough, on the last day, the last Marine got on the boats and left. The point is, this is not central Kansas. Central Kansas is important. We fight for it, even though some people wouldn't think so, but it's important. But we're not in central Kansas. We're in places like Vietnam or Panama or Central Africa or the Middle East. It doesn't make any difference. It's not America.

So we have to be very careful what we're committing ourselves to. And nobody seems to be interested in doing that. And it seems like the model is pretty clear. The formula that they sell to the narrative, which is why I'm in media doing what I'm doing, is to deal with the narrative, to tell the truth.

I noticed your slogan, the truth will set you free. I mean, that's kind of the idea is let the truth out and you don't have to defend it. It'll defend itself. As St. Augustine said, it's like a lion. And so that's what we're here to accomplish. And I think that you, that's one of the reasons why I've had you on my show back. I remember back in the day, it was, I would have them on and then I'd see them. I'd be doing my radio show just down the road from here in Orlando, iHeartRadio, Orlando. And I'd look at the TV monitor and I'd say,

There's Tucker with Colonel McGregor. I'm having him on tomorrow. And it was like, it was just back and forth. But you were the only guy for years as a voice in the military, other than, you know, Ron Paul, but he was, you know, he wasn't really, he had been retired at that point, that had been saying this message of what I call strategic independence.

It's a muscular foreign policy that's smart, not dumb. It's not completely what we would call crony captured like everything else in DC where you're sold a bill of goods. Oh, we must do this for your protection. And they always do the same formula, whether it's,

babies in incubators and desert storm or whatever. It's always a victim narrative. Oh, Assad, as soon as Trump said he wanted to leave, Assad said, you know what I'll do? I'll just gas my own people. He said he's going to leave me alone. Let me gas my own people real quick just to make sure he has an incentive to stay. You know, these stupid narratives, Gulf of Tonkin, all these different ones, they always use this victim inciting narrative that pulls on heartstrings.

And then they say, we got to go over there and be the policemen. But we're a crooked cop. That's what it looks like. We're actually a crooked cop. The original crooked cop, to be frank, was a man named Randolph Hearst. And Randolph Hearst sent journalists down to Cuba. He said, I want you to go down there and cover the war. He said, what war? He said, well, the big civil war. He said, why? He said, well, I want you to go down there and cover it. But what if there's nothing happening? He said...

I'll provide the war. You just go down and cover what happens. And he did everything in his power to bring on the Spanish-American War. Well, we've had a media much like that ever since. Very, very rarely do you have a media that turns against something. We had that happen in 68, 69 because of the Tet Offensive. And everybody hated Dan Rather.

But Dan Rather had served as a Marine for two years during the draft. He did actually know something about what was going on. And he was talking to people just like Omar Bradley, and they were telling him privately the same thing. So he came back and tried to tell the truth. And everybody said, he's a communist. He's a fifth columnist. Tried to burn him down. And finally, Walter Cronkite, you know, the great icon, said, I can no longer support this. And people said, oh, no, we've lost Walter Cronkite. We've lost the war.

Well, ever since then, there's been a concerted effort to make sure that the media isn't lost. And that's why you have to appreciate someone like Noam Chomsky, whether you agree with his political views or not.

He wrote a book called Manufactured Consent. And that's what we have now. We have a lot of manufactured consent. Right. And we don't like the results. It's carnage. It's destruction. It's inflation. It's people wanting to hurt us and our kids for other people's sins. You know, we're being, you know, it's not the way it's supposed to be. But never, ever, ever show pictures on television.

of American soldiers being killed, or the consequences of our bombing, or the consequences of our attacks, and how many people are slaughtered, how many people are wounded, and so forth. And we never go back and revisit where we were. Today, if you go to Libya, what do you see? You still see carnage. You still see a wrecked country. There is still fighting. It is not restored by any means to its former self.

you could say that about iraq iraq is divided internally there are different militias that operate for different reasons so and if we look at afghanistan what did we change nothing

In fact, we helped to put the people back in power who were there when we showed up. And we were guarding child traffickers' houses. Oh, of course. That's disgusting. I mean, I've talked to great patriots like Ben Adams, who's now a state representative in Idaho. And I remember him telling me the horror of them having to be posted out

guarding a known child pedophile who was a warlord. And the American government said, that's your job is to make sure that you shoot down any of his victims, including a boy who wanted to get a revenge on what he was done to him. And our government, ladies and gentlemen, said you shoot down that boy trying to get revenge after the atrocities done to him. That is disgrace. It really is a disgrace. There was an attempt when General Petraeus was the commander

in Afghanistan to take action against some Australian unit. It found out that the local police had collected all the little boys in the village, put them in a room and raped them. And the Australians, of course, natural, normal people were appalled and disgusted. Ultimately, they moved the Australians out and then covered it all up. But you're right. It's not only that, it's also heroin trafficking.

And the funny thing is that once this Taliban came back in, the heroin production nosedogged. Right. That tells you something right there. It's very, very interesting. Where that fentanyl came from. Interesting. You never know how that stuff works. But that's the nature of the kind of shadowy, kind of clandestine world that we are not allowed to know what goes on there. We're supposed to just believe that adults are at the wheel, but they're not. Trump, one of the things that you said when you said that the victims –

are really, they never show the soldiers, the coffins, right? President Trump, to his credit, one of the things that I think he said that was the most powerful I'd ever seen was when he would say in his rallies, and he did this in 2020, and he still did it up three years later, he would say, when you see these beautiful families of these fallen soldiers, and they're so well-dressed, and they're so poised, and they say, sir, thank you, sir. And he says, but when that

think when that helicopter lands or the plane lands and they see the coffin come out, he said the way they lose it, he said, I changed me. I saw the cost of war at a level and I never want to send our people in those kinds of situations. And he also, to his credit, just like you did, he always often mentioned the vicious carnage on the other sides of these conflict that the Iraqi children, the Iraqi human beings, the Syrians right now,

Their lives matter just as much as our lives matter. And there is no reason to be soft peddling or promoting this in any way, shape or form. No, I think that's right. And let's hope that he carries that with him through his term of office and gives that serious consideration. Yeah.

Before he signs off on any more operations like the ones we're witnessing now. So the reason why the main topic, like you mentioned here, that I wanted to get you to help me understand better, because this is something that I'm not as familiar with, but I'm interested in learning more from you, which is you have this defense paper, and I saw you talk about it on the Ron Paul Liberty Report with Daniel McAdams and Ron Paul. And it's a defense paper called Taming the Warfare State.

And what caught my attention about this is I had a little hand in helping Ron Paul and Elon Musk kind of collaborate together to extraordinary conversations that have happened so far about the Department of Government Efficiency, what Elon plans to do to try to reform government at every level that he can have an opportunity to shape. And he has Vivek Ramaswamy on now, and Ron Paul seems to be becoming an advisor because of what we put in motion on my show, A Neighbor's Choice.

In that vein, the Defense Department is the biggest, in fact, of all of the budget, right? And that's the... No, no, no. Your entitlements are bigger. Okay. And in terms of discretionary spending, right? Yeah, discretionary spending is number one. That's the biggest. That's what I meant to say. So in discretionary spending, this is the biggest piece of the pie of our debt crisis. And your paper here, the first thing you're talking about is that fiscal crisis. Right.

What's your plan in this paper, taming the warfare state, your outline here to rein in the fiscal crisis from the Department of Defense? I think the first thing that people need to understand is that if you're going to change anything, you have to have a new national military strategy. And most of you will remember that back during Donald Trump's first term,

they created this allegedly new national military strategy, which was really neither new nor particularly rational. It simply said, we regard Russia and China as enemies, we regard Iran as a rogue state. There was a rehash of what had been going on all through the 90s and in the early part of the century. And the national military strategy then focused everyone in military planning on interventions and operations, both clandestine as well as open,

to deal with these alleged existential threats. What you got out of that was, as usual, more military spending.

You know, we never run out of threats to identify. I mean, the nation has never been without threats since we were founded, but we are more secure today, not as much as we were, but we were certainly when Mr. Trump became president and during most of his four years, more secure then than at probably any time in our American history. But people didn't want to see it that way. So we created these fictional threats because there were foreign interests as well as domestic interests

that wanted to involve us overseas. And this overseas empire is kind of a self-licking ice cream cone. You know, it's a place where everybody wants ice cream, so you go abroad to get your ice cream, and then you don't ever want to run out, so you send more ice cream. It's unnecessary. And the opportunity now, I think, is quite real over the next few months because I expect the economy to take a nosedive. I think the financial crisis that all of us are worried about is imminent.

and you know this is this black swan thing that nasim talib originated in his work and he's not the only one and you can listen to luke luke roman or richard's records any number of people economists kyle bass they're all very well versed in these things

And they'll tell you just how fragile our position is. And it is because we've exported our manufacturing base and so forth. So the first thing is you want a different strategy. Well, what was the strategy that we had before we went to the First World War? And what did we go back to after the First World War that served us well until 1939? Well, that strategy was called hemispheric defense. In other words, that we were going to defend first and foremost our hemisphere.

We understood that what happened in Mexico, Central America, South America was important to us. What happened in Canada was important to us. But we were preeminently concerned about protecting our continent and the people who live on it. That has gone completely by the wayside since World War II because then we adopted this position that what emerged from the Second World War could not exist for very long unless we garrisoned the world to make sure that it did.

and at the same time we had this thing called bretton woods which meant that everybody would now use the dollar the dollar would become the world reserve currency all transactions of importance internationally would be in dollars and so forth all of those things are changing very very rapidly what we've got now is a situation where we have to anticipate crises at home we have a very

a very fragile society, I would argue, that is not cohesive. We are not unified as a nation as we once were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And so embarking upon foreign adventures of military activity is dangerous. So what are we talking about? First and foremost, we're talking about a military strategy that is designed to avoid war.

All you ever hear about is what we're deterring. We're deterring. Well, that presumes there's somebody out there who's anxious to push the button, go to war. That's not really true. And in fact, today, how do you deter someone who has as much or more military power than you do? So what you really want to do is you want to de-conflict things. You want to avoid conflict.

So you set up a system of defense as well as commerce and economic development that is designed to cooperate with, not fight the rest of the world. Yeah. So you're talking about diplomacy and peace of cooperation. Yes, of course. Always. That should be first and foremost. And we've got to get out of this global military hegemony system, which is really what we've been building. And we have all of these regional unified commands. How many do we really need?

And people say, well, you know, we have the Indo-Pacific Command. We've never had any interest in the Indian Ocean. What are we doing with the Indo-Pacific? It's just this continuous expansion of interest and capability. And just because you have the capability to do something doesn't necessarily mean you should do it. So we need to reduce those regional unified commands. The other thing is communications. A hundred years ago, it was very difficult to communicate around the world.

Today, it's lightning fast. So you don't need all the intermediate levels of command, all the additional command structures to manage your own defense. And it puts the American military in a very, very difficult position. You have all these four stars, some 44, and these four stars that are in charge of regional unified commands, functional commands, so forth.

They all are looking for business. Think of them as CEOs with a corporate structure and they're actually looking for business. So they're constantly looking at, well, we need to be involved in the Philippines over here. See this. And we need to be prepared for what happens in Taiwan. Oh, well, there's Malaysia.

Malaysia and Indonesia. They're looking for monsters to destroy. Exactly. They read John Quincy Adams and they did the opposite. It's a constant search, a reason to be there. They're looking for Loch Ness if they can find it. Exactly. And that's true all over the world. It doesn't make any difference where you go. And it's just wrong. And so we can change all of that and we're not putting ourselves at risk.

You know, one of the things that we lose sight of is that if you travel across the United States and you go past Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on the Missouri River, and then you drive out to Fort Riley and people frequently go by there and said, what's this fort doing way out in the middle of nowhere? Well, back in the mid 19th century, Riley was exactly one day's horse ride from Leavenworth. That meant that if Riley were under attack, you could get on your horse and within an hour you could ultimately reach Leavenworth.

Fort Riley, and that's how we built these forts. Well, we don't have that today. We can communicate from Fort Leavenworth to Phoenix, Arizona instantly. We don't have to have little outposts everywhere. This is part of this thing that's grown like Topsy. So it's outdated. It's an outdated kind of... And it's unaffordable. Right. It's incredibly expensive. In your paper, this paper, Taming the Warfare State, that kind of sets out your vision for reform,

You're talking about a trillion dollar annual foreign policy. Annual budget right now. Okay. And so what would you administer in terms of cuts? How would you cut that down? Well, there are several things that you need to do. First of all, you need to come to terms with reality that you don't need all these commands. At the same time, you don't need 44 force stores. We have a force of 1.18 million men under arms, or men and women now. Mm-hmm.

If you look at that and you compare it to the Second World War, at the height of the Second World War, we had seven four-stars. We had four in the Army and the Army Air Corps, and then we had three in the Navy. We didn't have any Marine four-stars. Mm-hmm.

We seem to have done reasonably well since we had 12.2 million men under arms. Now, people say, well, wait a minute, Dal. Some of these generals were five stars or so. Well, yes, the war was winding down at the end in the last six months. People were promoted and given honorifics. That means an honorary promotion to something. We didn't have this vast military bureaucracy that justified four stars everywhere.

Well, after World War II and we get into the Cold War, everything changes. Now we start setting up headquarters all over the place, structures, building theaters for future war. And the problem today is that if you tried to move large numbers of forces quickly from the east coast of the United States to the west coast of Europe,

they'd never get there yeah because of satellite-based intelligence surveillance reconnaissance vast numbers of strike systems submarines people forget it took about three years to defeat yeah and we never completely defeated it but we defeated it to to a large extent the submarine fleet the germans had you know that means three years how much tonnage how many lives were lost

That held us back. That's why we could not land before 1944. We had to clear those oceans. We don't even bring that up now. And we talk in a cavalier way about, well, if Russia does this, we'll do this. China does this, we'll do this. Today, China, Russia, even Iran, many other states now, India, increasingly Pakistan, they have the ability to reach out.

and target you, find you, and eliminate you long before you reach their shores. So the old paradigm doesn't work. So let's recap. So far we've talked about this fiscal crisis and how we can leverage this as an opportunity to cut waste.

in there well i'd say streamline streamline simplify yeah well that saves you in this paper what 400 500 billion yeah especially as you move on that's half yeah that's asking that's one half for those who and rush limbaugh would say in rio linda where they have to do for those of you in rio linda that's half the budget he said you could just streamline the the the defense department you can cut half of the budget waste now

It sounds to me a similar parallel that a lot of folks listening might be more familiar with because not everybody's hanging out in the Department of Defense, right? Would be like schools, you know, education, right? Everybody knows that so much of school teachers today are

they don't get to teach the art of education as much as they're dealing with this massive top heavy bureaucracy that's got all these grifters selling them on all these endless programs and the kids are the last thing on their mind and the teachers freedom and ability to do what they have to do is the last thing on that bureaucracy's mind. Sounds similar parallel to what you're saying here. To some extent. I think education all has a problem with the mission. What is their mission?

And I would argue that the mission of education for 80 to 85% of the population is to provide a path to employment. We keep trying to send everybody to college. And frequently I run into people that spend four years at any number of different colleges say, well, why, what was the point of this? It was a waste of time. We have to completely restructure education. We've got to restructure the military to get the product that you want. Now, education has been failing for decades, right?

IQ in the United States has been dropping for decades. In other words, we were smarter 30 years ago than we are today. 40, 50 years ago, we were smarter. 60, 70 years ago, there was almost no public education. That was a recent development in the 20th century. Yet everybody could read and write. In other words...

We've got to go back and look at what we want to produce. The same thing is true in the military. We cannot live in the old World War II paradigm, the notion that we have to be everywhere to put out fires. We're not going to get to the fires. Trying to get there will sink us. We've got to find a different way forward. And the people that are out there that want to be dependent upon us, like our European allies, they have to become their own first responders. And small states...

Well, look at Israel, small states can be very powerful and they are eminently capable of defending themselves if they have the right mix of capability. And that's what the rest of this paper is about. How do you redesign forces? We always look at everything through the old lens that has its origins in the 19th century. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine. Well, wait a minute.

Why don't we step back and say, what are the capabilities that we need? You don't allocate money to services. You allocate money in support of capabilities, and you organize forces with those capabilities. It's a different way to look at things. And there were people trying to do this in the early part of the 2000s under Bush, but it was shoved aside because of the war in Iraq.

That has to happen. So you've got to have a strategy that's different. Yeah. It no longer says we're going to be everywhere doing everything all the time. What is the mission statement? To protect the Western Hemisphere? Well, it's to protect us. But the first part of protecting the United States is avoid war. Right. Why are we looking for wars? Yeah. Why do we want to be involved in other people's wars? Right. Why do we want to fund other people's wars? How does that keep us safe? It doesn't. Eminently clear, it does not. Yeah.

And that's what people don't seem to understand about what's happening today in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. We don't benefit in any way from this. So what do we want to do? We need to redesign these forces. We need to look at intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance everywhere from seabed all the way to space and look at those things and how do you organize those and the information is collected and analyzed and bring that to formations, whether it's sea, on the land, in the air, on the planet.

And then what are the systems that you want to invest in that are going to prove to be effective? Everyone is staggering in disbelief at the Oreshnik missile. The hypersonic. Yeah, the hypersonic missile. Well, we've been dabbling in hypersonics. We did in the 1960s. We didn't get very far. The Germans actually looked at it in the 1940s. But the technology was not yet mature enough.

All of your intercontinental ballistic missiles are hypersonic. They all come in at 15,000 feet per second. You can't shoot them down. You just can't. Now, that may change at some point, but you're looking at a change in the laws of physics and fractal mathematics, things that we have yet to break, okay?

so we have to step back and say well what do we really want to do and if you look at this arresting missile and you can fire say 10 of those at any given point in time say from the lithuanian border with russia all the way down to romania and pick out 10 targets and you're literally going to put 36

precision-guided munitions as a result of these 10 missiles. Each missile produces 36. So do the math. It's pretty obvious. You've got a hell of a lot of precision. How many bases, log bases, command and control air bases can you destroy in the space of what, 15 minutes? And you can't stop it. Now, let that sink in for a minute.

Remember that we stripped away the German Air Force from the German army in the field. Everybody was back defending cities against the Anglo-American air assaults.

We lost an estimated 17,000 or 18,000 bombers to German anti-aircraft systems and planes during the Second War. Think about that. How many bombers do we have on any given day in this country? 20, 30? How many are operational? Mm-hmm.

Can you overcome a modern integrated air and missile defense system easily? We don't know because we've never done it. Maybe we'll get a chance to see, unfortunately, but we've never done it. But just think of the numbers. Today, what's the loss of a bomber mean? You're losing billions of dollars.

The same thing is true for capital ships. If you're going to try and fight the war with aircraft carriers, you're going to lose aircraft carriers. They're going to be damaged, put out of action. Some may sink. Everybody says, well, the aircraft carrier is unsinkable. Maybe, but you don't need to sink it. If you make its deck unusable, it no longer has any military value at sea because it's there to launch aircraft. And what happens to all the munitions on board if they become struck for some reason?

The point is everything is changing. And we haven't even talked about unmanned systems per se. Yeah. And they're having an effect. It's like drones and stuff. Yes. Unmanned systems are going to have a monumental effect. But the problem we need to keep in mind is for every technological measure, there is a countermeasure. Right. This is an unending battle in military affairs. So if you're going to fight, you have to have the ability to protect your force as well as to strike the other force.

This is not easy. This is difficult. But we have to change the way we think about fighting if we're going to survive and hopefully in the future win. You're talking about a paradigm shift here. Yeah, a complete paradigm shift. Exactly right. And, you know, I sometimes get frustrated because I think I used to love the Harlem Globetrotters. Yeah. The Harlem Globetrotters were brilliant. They were funny and they were brilliant ballplayers.

And they were all black, as we say now, all African-American. And they always played an all white team. And everybody laughed because they beat the living daylights out of the white team. I mean, they just couldn't compete. And it was all in good fun. But I sometimes think that we're our generals, our military organization is sort of like the team that always loses to the Harlem Globetrotters. You know, we just don't field winning teams. Designated losers. Yeah, we've turned ourselves into that.

And everybody says, well, that's not true. We can penetrate this. We can do that. I've listened to all of this for my life, all life. Ironically, they call that team the Washington Generals. Did you know that? That's the team that the Globetrotters would face off. Well, probably would. The Washington Generals. Well, there you go. Maybe they knew something you were talking about there all that time.

but I'm tired of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we got to get back. You can see it in your voice. This is something that you're passionate about. You've spent your, your lifetime trying to look at this from a systems perspective, not just. And also human capital. Right. Yeah. Because the tendency in military affairs is to say,

where's the silver bullet? Oh, this technology will deliver victory. If I can build enough of these widgets, these super fly widgets, then they'll defeat everybody. That's crazy. It's a marriage of human capital with technology. And that's not just on an individual basis. It's in the form of units, formations, organizations. That's what emerged from the second world war. But that paradigm is no longer useful.

We need new organizations, new formations, new command structures, and we need good human capital. People that say, well, you don't need to be very smart to be a soldier. Oh, my God. They've never seen the military because today's military requires a very capable person, someone who is intelligent. And more than ever, you have to have people who can think and execute without constant supervision. Mm-hmm.

That's hard. And then also being allowed to fight to win. I know that's a complaint I hear a lot from folks. I think people need to understand that we are always, always, and we firmly believe this, at least I do. We are obedient to political masters. We have, whether we like it or not, people that are appointed and elected over us.

They are always going to impose some constraints on us. It's inevitable. The notion of, well, let's just get all these civilians out of here and then we can win. Yeah. Well, I admit that in the case. I don't want to do that. I admit that in the case of what I heard from folks over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, these stories, too, where they end up having to do policeman actions.

to try to help them teach our values by the barrel of a gun. And then that becomes the focus, nation building versus actually doing something that would-- - Well, let me give you another example of how important the right civilian leadership can be. I'm not always a fan of FDR, but FDR got some things right. And one of them was Marshall and the army all wanted to land in France in 1942.

And then when they couldn't land in 42, they wanted to land in 43. And it was insane. I mean, the British who'd fought the Germans said, we have no chance. We'll never make it onto the beach. Remember in 1942 and 43, the German armed forces were at peak efficiency. It would take another year for them to grind down on the Eastern front, killing millions and millions of Soviet soldiers, but eventually giving ground and falling back.

FDR looked at the map and says, "No, we're not going to land in Europe. That's not a good idea. We need to land in North Africa." And the army officers looked and said, "Why?"

There's nothing in North Africa. They're wrong. Because he understood that control of North Africa as it faces the Atlantic Ocean was strategically vital if we were going to win the Battle of the Atlantic and control the oceans. Because it's more and more obvious that aircraft flying over the ocean were going to control it, as opposed to putting thousands of ships out of there. We had thousands of aircraft who could fly over it.

So we landed in North Africa, a very smart move. But the army generals were only thinking of straight ahead, land, and then charge frontally into the Germans. A dumb idea. So FDR gets credit for that as a civilian leader who intervened. Now he had been secretary of the Navy for several years. He knew people in the Navy. He understood maritime strategy and the importance of North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean just across from the Caribbean basin. I mean, that's a very short, short story.

So you have to control that in a major war like the one we were fighting against the Germans and the Italians. So civilian leadership, if it's informed and thoughtful, is vital and essential. When it doesn't know anything, it's dangerous. Because then you're asking the four stars to think it up. Well, why do we need to go there? Tell me, General. Uh-uh.

The civilians should already know whether or not we really need to be there and keep us out. Unfortunately, nobody's been in that business now for decades. For sure. Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, I really want to I want to land the plane here. And I just want to say, you know, I just seeing how enthusiastic people's hunger for real life.

paradigm shifts in government with this incoming administration, seeing what I was able to see with Elon's enthusiasm, Elon Musk coming out enthusiastically in support of some of the things that are similar to this, like auditing the Pentagon and cutting out foreign aid and all these big paradigm shift things that he seems to be bringing to the table. Elon Musk, if you're watching,

I think you should read this document, Taming the Warfare State. I'm saying that from my perspective as someone who is new to this, but as someone who is passionate about the same things that I hear Elon say, I'm going to put this on, if you don't mind, I'm going to put this and tag this on my website. I'm going to put this on my ex, Elon. And I think you should take a look at this because I think this is a whole new paradigm that you're mentioning here. Okay, Dave, I appreciate it. Thank you.

And that's it for this interview. And I want to continue to encourage people to go to our website at neighborschoice.com, ourcountryourchoice.com. Is that true? Right. Ourcountryourchoice.com. And you can always follow us, myself, at David Gronowski on X, where, Elon, I'm going to leave this document. And I hope that you take a look at this because this is, I think, what we need. Thank you, Dave. And thank everybody for listening, as always.